“... to understand the person’s features in motion over time. That hadn’t always been the case. Michael Wishart, the son of Freud’s lover Lorna Wishart, said that when Freud was young, you couldn’t blink while he was painting your thumb or he became ‘distressed’. The majority of Freud’s prints, made three and a half decades later, were part of a ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... about carving. It’s funny, but not altogether harmless, a slightly darker take on Under Milk Wood, as it might be. The word ‘heavy’ has a lot to do with it. As for the English, the book is so stuffed with digs at them that one never has long to wait: ‘He shook hands like a limp rag and looked down his nose at me with his big popping eyes and said ...”

“... From Right and Left (1929): ‘In the gloaming, only the silver birches in the little wood opposite would shimmer, standing amongst the other trees like slips of days amongst ancient nights.’ Joseph Roth was born in 1894 on the rim of the Habsburg Empire in Brody, Austrian Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine. (He may well be related to the ...”

“... and fascinating claim, with radical implications for the historiography of the period. Michael Thompson has had something of the same intuition about Victorian society, and it is one of several themes in his new book which makes this much more than the undergraduate or A-level toolkit which it might appear to be. We know a great deal about the ...”

“... Holder whiskers, the period of ‘Exposure’, of ‘long-haired and thoughtful’, of the ‘wood-kerne’ and the ‘inner émigré’. But the cheekbones are there. And a listener for sure. ‘You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note,’ he has the ghost of Joyce address him in the marvellous ‘Station Island’ sequence from 1984. Tweed ...”

“... they can’t plant woods, only plantations. Even under trees grown next to an existing ancient wood, plants such as oxlip spread by only about a metre a year, and then only if the right kind of ant is present to carry the seeds. There is no use thinking you can provide species that don’t like the heat with an escape from climate change by planting up ...”

“... Castle. On the cover of the recent paperback of Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood* there is a photograph of him as a little boy young enough to be in a frock, which was probably among the photographs he happened to look at through an old stereoscope, surprising himself into saying what a dear little fellow he had been. Quite ...”

“... called Operation Overt. Although they made rather less noise about it in public than the feisty Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, the Met too tried to get the government to compensate them for some of the money they had spent. Their complaints are available online. Apart from the first few days – in which the prosecution laid out its most incendiary evidence ...”

“... and iron pins, bits of ancient Celtic jewellery. One hot afternoon I uncovered a charred piece of wood with two verdigris teeth sticking through it. I ran to show it to my mother – ran through the heavy shifting sand, tripped, and as I clenched it, the little bit of dry wood melted to dust. Disappointed, I clutched the ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... completely were they forgotten that last year, when the environmental consultants Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger rebuked the environmental movement for neglecting the resources of economic growth and human ingenuity, they seemed unaware that there had once been a movement in America that championed both. Nordhaus and Shellenberger wrote Break ...”

“... I paint a big picture, then afterwards I usually want to engrave something small and meticulous on wood, and I can sit over it for a whole day ... Assiduousness, laboriousness is something innate in us Germans: it is our element, we feel at ease in it. In Tieck’s Dürer the contrariety of hand and mind, North and South, craft and art, is complicated into ...”

“... been or thought to go) that reminded me of Mandelstam’s Moscow, a ‘tossed salad of glass and wood and milk’: The next morning, when the city stirred to life, they both lay awake in their own beds. The homing pigeons flew across the sky, the small brass whistles bound to their tails humming in a harmonious low tone. Not far away, Tao music played on a ...”

“... he’s getting down might be nonsense. During her time at the National Beryl appeared opposite Michael Gough in the world premiere of Edward Albee’s Counting the Ways. It was a strange choice to open the vast new complex with – a small play. In the course of it, the performers are required to throw off impersonation and improvise briefly as ...”